Have you read it? - it covers the why of the theories pretty well IMHO.
1) Because an immense energy / matter concentration warps spacetime - not just space but space time! Time stops from an Einsteinium POV at the event horizon of a black hole. Spacetime is so curved at the event horizon that you can call it closed - barely a part of our universe at all. Information falling into a black hole is lost forever to our Universe.
2) Of course its all models and theories. New Scientist and Scientific America did good articles on this in the last 14 months.
3) I mean can't handle. The physics simply doesn't work - it fails, it breaks down, it does not apply, it does not hold title there, it can't be used in these environments, there reality is something other than the frameworks of existence where relativity applies, possible even quantum mechanics breaks down there too!
4) The Universe is expanding at roughly light speed in all directions. Our planet revolves at 1,000 mph at the eqautor. Our Earth travels around the sun covering its 7,000 mile diameter about every 3 minutes. Our solar system moves relativitive to galaxy at about 50 miles a second. We are in the Virgo cluster of the milky way - heading towards Andromeda galaxy at 200 miles a second, our supercluster is probably travelling in excess of 20,000 miles a second etc...
Where is this stationary point in an inflating Universe you refer to? Everything is moving, even the co-ordinate system itself is getting bigger!
And no to your last point of chronological order according to Hawking and his physics on Black holes - this gives the Universe increased non-determinism (they eat information out of existence) - showing in a way we have multiple possible pasts.
To understand the theories and why they occur and how they are tested and what they exist you have to ask what does reality appear to be. Where are you at with your thinking on this point?
Hi gday: 200 miles per second toward Andromedia. that's 720,000 miles per hour = 17,280,000 miles perday = 6.31 billion miles per year = 1.05 light years per thousand years. In 2 billion years, the merger will be over, and Andromedia will be departing our vicinity, assuming 1,750,000 light years to Andromedia at present, and little change in the average speed.
I presume a near miss is as likely as a temporary merger. Neil
Neil that's right, I had heard Andromeda and our galaxy are on a likely collision course in about 3 billion years.
It would be pretty catalysmic - even for a near miss. Around 500 billion stars dancing around would cause huge releases of cosmic rays and x-rays - pretty sure to savage most life systems anywhere near (in astronomical terms) the vicinity of the merge
I thought Andromeda was 2.2 million light years away.
Hi Tobruk: 2.2 is likely correct. Newer estmates are farther than old estimates. That would check better with the g day 3 billion years, but some experts think Earth might survive, even if the galaxies passed staight though each other. Neil
The experts I've read have said that not much will happen when the galaxies collide. Stars will swap galaxies and others will spin off into intergalactic space but the chances of any solar systems colliding are prett small.
There is a book called "the elegant universe" by brian green... it's not as pretty as hawkings' but it explains where and how the theories came to be. einstein actually tested his hypothesis about the bending of space around the sun back in 1920. he found a pulsar far off whos light would have to graze the sun to reach earth. he calculated that if spaced warped as he has thought, the light from that star would be reflected at .0045 degrees from the sun's indentation in space. during an eclipse he measured the angle of reflection and found that he was right...
as far as time is concerned... it's ALL relative. einstein also said that instead of thinking of us moving through 3-d space, <x,y,z> vector motion, imagine 4-d, time being the last plane. all bodies are moving at the speed of light. that is, the magnitude of their vector v=<x,y,z,t>, is always equal to the speed of light. as with all vectors, to change direction while maintaining speed requires a shift in the components such that their magnitude will remain unchanged... so if we begin moving in say one direction (x) and approach the speed of light, the t (time) component (as well as the others) will approach zero to maintain the constant magnitude of the vector... so there's your warping of time explained pretty simply. (of course this does not prove it, but there are many experiments that do)
Because the speed of light is constant, if a beam of light actually bent, the inner edge of the beam would reach you first (the outter edge has further to travel.) This doesn't happen, and we know that the light on the outter edge can't speed up, so it can only look like it's bending, it can't actually be bent.
